The goal of language technology (LT) is to develop systems which allow people to communicate with computers using natural languages. LT is an interdisciplinary field, requiring knowledge from subjects like linguistics, statistics, psychology, engineering and computer science. This course discusses fundamentals of natural language processing (NLP), which is one of the subfields of LT, and introduces research in the field, in part with regard to the Icelandic language. Students acquire understanding of the various stages of NLP, e.g. morphological analysis, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, discourse and dialogue. In the course, students work on programming projects related to the aforementioned stages.
On completing the course, students should:
The course assessment is as follows:
| Part of Course | Total Weight |
|---|---|
| Three individual projects/assignments; 3*10% | 30% |
| A final project (can be worked on in a group of two students) | 30% |
| Participation in class (discussions, Piazza, labs) | 10% |
| A final written exam | 30% |
| Total 100% | |
To provide a rich hands-on experience, students will build their own application (a final project) that relies on NLP over the course of the semester. A number of project proposals will be provided by the instructors, but students are also encouraged to come up with their own ideas. Three homework projects/assignments will also be distributed during the semester to reinforce some of the more theoretical material.
Everything that has to be turned in should arrive no later than at 23:59 on the due date, or else incur 10% penalty for each additional day, including weekends and holidays. Projects are not accepted if handed in more than two days late.
Students need to hand in at least 70% of the lab projects in order to take the final exam.
| Assignment | Assigned | Due | Duration | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assignment I | Mon 7. Sep. | Wed 16. Sep. (Week 5) | 10 days | 10% |
| Assignment II | Mon 28. Sep. | Wed 7. Oct (Week 8) | 10 days | 10% |
| Assignment III | Tue 20. Oct. | Wed 28. Oct (Week 11) | 9 days | 10% |
| Final project | Mon 28. Sep. | Fri 6. Nov (Week 12) | 6 weeks | 30% |
| Total 60% | ||||
| Team | Members | Proejct |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Szymon Klepacz and Felix Weissl | 1.15 Question-Answering System |
| 2 | Steve Losh | Tweet Scraping and Sentiment Analysis |
| 3 | Jacopo de Berardinis, Carlo Castagnari, Giorgio Focina | 1.13 Intelligent Computer-Assisted Languge Learning (Italian?) |
| 4 | Kristján Rúnarsson | 1.15 Intonation for Text-to-Speech |
| 5 | Tinna Frímann Jökulsdóttir | 1.13 Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (Icelandic) |
| 6 | Starkaður Barkarson | 1.13 Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (Icelandic) |
| 7 | Sigurður Jónsson | Knowledge Representation and Reasoning |
| 8 | Arnar Freyr Bjarnason | TBD |
| 9 | Ívar Örn Ragnarsson | Text Summarization |
There will be a final written exam counting 30% towards your grade.
| Topic | Title | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Lexical analysis / Regex matching | JFlex | http://jflex.de/ |
| Lexical analysis / Regex matching | Basic tokenizer for Icelandic | http://www.ru.is/kennarar/hrafn/courses/nlp/IceBasic.zip |
| Regular expressions | grep tutorial | http://www.uccs.edu/~ahitchco/grep/ |
| Regular expressions | sed tutorial | http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html |
| Finite state transducers | HFST | http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/kieliteknologia/tutkimus/hfst/ |
| Finite state transducers | foma | https://code.google.com/p/foma/ |